Understanding Intentions of Corporate Sustainability Approaches

Abstract

Corporate sustainability is the transposed idea of sustainable development to business systems. Many approaches towards integrating corporate sustainability have been developed. However there are still companies who struggle with the integration of corporate sustainability. Misalignment between the organizational culture and the corporate sustainability strategies and activities is identified as one of the barriers towards full integration. To allow alignment between organizational culture and corporate sustainability it should be known how corporate sustainability approaches are intended to be used or i.e.: what is the desired behaviour in the use of a specific approach. Sustainable procurement intentions have not been studied before and there is general need for more research towards it. This research aims to contribute to the understanding of the intentions of sustainable procurement as an integration approach of corporate sustainability. Research will be done by conducting a literature study and a complementary single qualitative case-study. The Mapping of Corporate Sustainability Approaches framework developed by Witjes et al. (2015) is used as a categorization instrument and it provides visualization of the results found. Overall it was found that sustainable procurement involves having cooperative long-term relationships based on mutual trust and shared cultural values with all actors in the value chain of a company and that the environmental, social, and economical dimensions of sustainability should all be valued equally.